This end of season update of ITN website won’t be as rich as in previous seasons.
This is because of various reasons, the most important being the complete re-write of ITN website with the new skin.
Actually saying new skin is not proper, since we’re not only changing graphics, it is a complete recode, since we are removing as much tables as possible from the site, getting rid of frames, modelling menus, adding new features and adjusting existing ones. We could say we’re making a new website.
This is necessary, since new techniques of the web require an optimized website, and ours unfortunately is not. When it was made it was a great one, and modern for the time, but if we want to be user friendly, and optimized for search engines, we must use new scripts, and no frames.

MODIFICATION TO INTERNATIONAL ASSIGNMENT OF UNDER 21 GOALKEEPERS

At the beginning of December, we changed assignments of Under 21 goalkeepers.
It is no more based on GK tags, but on level of Keeping attribute.
This means that will be counted as keepers all players with attribute from good upwards.
This was needed because if a keeper had no suggested role, it wasn’t counted by the counter, and on the following youth promotion, the same nationality was picked.
From the beginning of Season 16 it will also be set counting players younger than 21 (not younger than 22 like now), so it anticipates the new season, choosing first who will be short of keepers the following season.
Activation date: Already active.

GAME ECONOMY

Here we are with a new report about ITN world economy. We are still in an inflation scenario, which we created because clubs were running out of money a few seasons ago.
We already started to balance this situation last season, and will continue during next one, since the gap is still big.
For this reason we are tweaking a few factors. Here they are:

- There will be a small weekly reduction of Advertising/Merchandise/TV Income. The average weekly reduction will be between £25,000 and £ 40,000 per team.
- There will be a slight rise in players wages. Actually this won’t make a real difference, since the slow reduction of over the top hidden attributes, is of course lowering the average wages on the other side. Therefore we just adjusted it to keep the previous ratios (average wages went down £300 per player since March 2010, we’re not taking them back to the same values).

Activation date: Friday 14th Jan

PROJECT: RULES/HELP PAGE REWRITING

We realized Help page is not always correct, or up with the latest game tweakings.
In a way to involve our community in the game, we thought about asking your help for this, so that we are sure anything will be missed out, listen to users opinions, and last but not least, encourage users to have a read to the game rules to discover something forgotten or unknown.
Therefore we are opening a thread on the New Managers/Help section of the forum, where we will post the help section parts, with our corrections, and we welcome your opinions on what is missing/wrong/not easy to understand.
We will also welcome suggestions on missing parts (i.e. new F.A.Q.’s that should be there but aren’t).
Activation date: Tuesday 11th Jan.

INTERNATIONAL TEAMS

International teams will see the number of scout slots available from 3 to one.
This request came from users, as an attempt to improve the competition, and reduce the number of walkovers.
And this makes sense too: club managers need slots to find players to buy, but International managers only need to scout their next opponents.
Activation date: Friday 14th Jan.

MESSAGE TO NEW MANAGERS IN THE GAME

New managers will receive a PM (or e-mail) when they join the game with links to game rules and tips (i.e. new managers/help forum, John's help page etc...). This has been thought in order to provide more help to new managers, so that they will be more interested in staying in the game. We welcome any other idea or suggestion on how to help new managers within ITN.
Activation date: Soon.

ITN FORUM: PRIVATE MESSAGES

As proposed by users, the limit of private messages on the inbox or sent messages will grow from 50 to 75.
Unfortunately we cannot enlarge it much for database space reasons, but at least it’s a little improvement which could come in handy.
Activation date: Tuesday 11th Jan

PLAYERS THOUGHTS

We are carrying on the project of players thoughts. We have changed some sentences thanks to users suggestions, and keep testing and collecting outcomes.
We will not use this feature with contract renewals since the beginning of the new season, since we are not sure how it works when very few matches are played. We fear that on the first week of the new season a player might be extremely happy if he played, or unhappy if he didn’t (since after 1 match, playing one is 100%, playing none is 0%).
For this reason we will have a look how players behave for the first 4-5 matches.
We could be using the new contract renewals (no more based only on morale or few other things, but based on players thoughts which has a whole set of variables in it) from half of next season, or at the beginning of Season 17.

FIXTURES RESHUFFLE

Some users proposed a reshape in leagues, which cannot be done without a heavy manual work every season. Instead, to give a fresh go, in particular for those leagues who have few teams changing every season (like Premier and D Level), we created a new fixture calendar set.
This is different from the one we have used so far, so it gives a totally different fixture list and can eventually be used on alternate seasons, to mix up fixtures a bit more than now.
Activation date: Next update.

STADIUM CONSTRUCTION TIME

Stadium construction times has been adjusted. We had to adapt it to the shorter season compared to old 26 weeks seasons, plus we realized it wasn't really realistic (adding 1,000 seats in 2 weeks...). Also adding many seats was way too long to wait for (adding 40,000 seats meant waiting for 41 real life weeks!). The new formula makes it more close to reality. Adding few seats will take a bit more time, but adding many will take less than before.
Stadia already in construction at the time of this tweak won't be affected by it.
Activation date: Already active.